I bought an old, musty copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road online. One of those hardcover books where the right edge of the paper is torn, not cut. The previous owner was a library in Pennsylvania, and it carries with it the dusty smell found only within the narrow aisles of a small town library. It is perfect.
Several times now I’ve found myself re-reading McCarthy’s disorganized bursts of language, awed by how he can so successfully pull off such chaos. He describes a post-apocalyptic world where survivors are cannibals and the only Good seems to reside within a father and his son, struggling to survive. The father, forever unnamed, often falls into faint remembrances of life before, a testament to the equal power and fragility of memory.
She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
Amazing.
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Agreed. I read this last year and it was one of the most powerful books I have ever read. The writing is stark and barren and perfectly suited to the nature of the book, yet beautiful and lyrical in a way that evokes tremendous detail from the periphery of the words themselves.
I love the photo. It is reminiscent of the mood in much of the book.